Freedom of Press: November 2007 Archives

By Stephen Wade, AP Sports Writer | Star Tribune Minneapolis-St. Paul
November 16, 2007

Chinese police will deal harshly with social or political demonstrations at the Beijing Olympics, a top security official said Friday.

Chinese police will deal harshly with social or political demonstrations at the Beijing Olympics, a top security official said Friday.

With 28,000 journalists expected to attend, the Aug. 8-24 Olympics offer a rare chance for protesters to express grievances against China's communist government on issues including religious freedom, Tibetan independence and global warming.

Liu Shaowu, deputy director of the Olympic Security Command Center, said security forces would stop any form of demonstration at or around venues. He also suggested that protests deemed threatening would be snuffed out far from Olympic sites.

"As for violating China's sovereignty and encouraging separatists and terrorists, definitely we will not allow that,'' Liu told reporters. "We will deal with that according to Chinese law.''

Liu's comments, made at a rare media briefing on Olympic security, are likely to compound concerns that Beijing will use heavy-handed policing at the games.

Defending the measures, Liu said the protest clampdown at Olympic sites is in line with the Olympic charter, which he said forbids "any form of political, religious or racial demonstration.''

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By Anita Chang | The Washington Times
November 13, 2007

The Chinese government has created profiles on thousands of foreign journalists coming to report on next summer's Beijing Olympics and is gathering information on thousands more to put into a database, a top official said in comments published yesterday.

The profiles appeared to undermine promises made by Chinese leaders in 2001, when they were bidding for the games, that the event would lead to greater press freedoms.

The database with information on the 28,000 foreign journalists expected for the Olympics would be a reference for interview subjects, designed to protect them from being tricked or blackmailed by "fake reporters," Liu Binjie, minister of the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP), was quoted as saying in the state-run China Daily newspaper.

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By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | The New York Times
November 01, 2007

China will not tolerate unauthorized parades, demonstrations or other gatherings during next year's Olympic Games, a police spokesman said Thursday in a warning to groups hoping to use the Games' visibility to publicize their causes.

''Any group or individual who stages a gathering, parade, or demonstration during the Beijing Olympic Games period must respect Chinese law,'' Public Security Ministry press officer Wu Heping said. ''As to those legal activities, police will protect them according to the law. As for those activities that are illegal, we police will handle them according to the law.''

Chinese law technically permits protests and other similar actions, but they require applications that are almost never approved. Those who dare even make such requests can be subject to surveillance, harassment or arrest, especially if the cause involved is seen to challenge Communist Party authority.

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By Oliver August | WIRED Magazine
October 2007

I didn't know I was a surveillance target until the day I walked into a hotel in China's Fujian province. I was pushing past half a dozen workmen changing lightbulbs in the glum but busy lobby when a uniformed man stepped in front of me. Blue jacket, creased trousers, braided epaulets, peaked cap: government security officer. Politely, he asked whether I would mind answering a few questions. He stood erect, with the manicured swagger of a corporate CEO. Next to him, a gangly plainclothes colleague gave me a so-you-thought-we-wouldn't-catch-you look.

How had they known I would be here? The only people who had my itinerary were my editors in London. A few days earlier, I had sent them an email outlining my trip, and I'd been updating them daily by phone. I could only assume that the authorities had been monitoring my email and calls. I had been chasing down leads on the whereabouts of Lai Changxing, China's most-wanted man. Lai had cheated the government out of $3.6 billion by smuggling oil, cars, and cigarettes. Embarrassed, Beijing wanted to hinder any reporting of his case.

The two officers in the hotel demanded to see my passport and asked what I knew about Lai. Then they withdrew to a corner of the lobby to confer. Eventually, they took me to a police car, drove me to the airport, and put me on a plane to Beijing.

It was, in short, impressive evidence of the government's ability to monitor and control electronic communication. And my experience only hinted at the Chinese government's appetite for control. Beijing has recently added a new weapon to its arsenal of surveillance technologies, a system it believes to be a modern marvel: the Golden Shield. It took eight years and $700 million to build, and its mission is to "purify" the Internet -- an apparently urgent task. "Whether we can cope with the Internet is a matter that affects the development of socialist culture, the security of information, and the stability of the state," President Hu Jintao said in January.

The Golden Shield -- the latest addition to what is widely referred to as the Great Firewall of China -- was supposed to monitor, filter, and block sensitive online content. But only a year after completion, it already looks doomed to fail. True, surveillance remains widespread, and outspoken dissidents are punished harshly. But my experience as a correspondent in China for seven years suggests that the country's stranglehold on the communications of its citizens is slipping: Bloggers and other Web sources are rapidly supplanting Communist-controlled news outlets. Cyberprotests have managed to bring about an important constitutional change. And ordinary Chinese citizens can circumvent the Great Firewall and evade other forms of police observation with surprising ease. If they know how.

Like its namesake, the Great Firewall consists of hundreds of individual fortifications spread out along a vulnerable frontier. At its core is a giant bank of computers and servers. Traffic generated by China's 162 million Internet users is routed through the shield, which checks all requested URLs against a blacklist of tens of thousands of Internet addresses. The list includes pages offering political information deemed dangerous by the government, like BBC News and Voice of America. Access to these sites is blocked (at least in theory), and when users attempt to view one of them, they are punished with an involuntary time-out lasting anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 minutes. Search engines are similarly restricted. If you enter the characters for "democracy" or "Tiananmen Square massacre" into Google.cn you will generally get zero results. This is a technological breakthrough for the Chinese government. Until recently, it could not interfere with the inner workings of search engines and instead blocked entire sites, not just individual pages of a site.

The Golden Shield hardware -- supplied by Cisco and other US companies -- is supplemented by human censors who are paid about $170 a month. They sit at screens in warehouse-like buildings run by the Public Security Bureau. These foot soldiers in China's information war monitor domestic news sites, erasing and editing politically sensitive stories. Some sites provide the censors with access so the authorities can alter content directly. Others get an email or a call when changes are required. Similar methods are applied to blogs. Sensitive entries are erased, and in the most egregious cases blogs are shut down altogether.

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